3.27.2009

one shining moment

I picked Michigan State and Missouri to go to the Elite Eight.

That almost makes up for the rest of my day, which involved - in order - having no choice but to overhear an inane conversation involving a med student who is learning Swahili to prepare for her trip to Nigeria, getting hailed on at the bus stop, having two insulin pumps freak out and stop working, wondering why anyone felt the need to jackhammer outside of my classroom (which is apparently just a ginormous echo chamber) during an exam, watching my perfectly-formatted dissertation freak out and refuse to behave, learning that the dissertation formatting angel-of-mercy leaves the office at 3:30 on Fridays, missing all the academic talks I'd intended to attend because I was fighting the dissertation formatting, being late to setup for dinner for the Africa Conference, and getting to be the one who had to tell ten happily occupied Nigerians that they had gone to eat in the wrong room. Oh, and a student dropped the course in the middle of the exam. She just handed me her drop form to sign, along with her completed test.

I made an announcement before I handed out a test that the drop date was rapidly approaching. One of the guys on the front row spent about 5 minutes on his test, then promptly got up and turned it in. It was blank and he immediately dropped.